Too many open files

[Jeffrey M. Vinocur]

*sigh*  My INN is unhappy.

This is a CVS prerelease from about a month ago (I haven't gotten 
around to doing subversion, so it's whatever is still on the isc.org 
CVS server) that has been running fine up until now.  Last night, it 
throttled for "Too many open files writing creating overview file -- 
throttling" without any obvious cause.  Eventually I just shut down INN 
entirely and started it up again, figuring it was some fluke thing.  
But I woke up this morning and it had done the same thing.

A little more investigation reveals that innd has open a normal number 
of overview files, plus an absurd number of socket descriptors.

~ > ls -l /proc/21948/fd | wc -l
1014

~ > ls -l /proc/21948/fd | head
total 0
lrwx------    1 root     root           64 Aug  7 09:50 0 -> /dev/null
l-wx------    1 root     root           64 Aug  7 09:50 1 -> 
/sysroot/var/log/news/news
lrwx------    1 root     root           64 Aug  7 09:50 10 -> 
socket:[326173405]
lrwx------    1 root     root           64 Aug  7 09:50 100 -> 
/usr/local/news/spool/overview/c/l/c/comp.lang.c.IDX
lrwx------    1 root     root           64 Aug  7 09:50 1000 -> 
/usr/local/news/spool/overview/s/c/i/soc.culture.iraq.DAT
lrwx------    1 root     root           64 Aug  7 09:50 1001 -> 
/usr/local/news/spool/overview/r/r/c/rec.radio.cb.DAT
lrwx------    1 root     root           64 Aug  7 09:50 1002 -> 
socket:[326158424]
lrwx------    1 root     root           64 Aug  7 09:50 1003 -> 
/usr/local/news/spool/overview/c/s/m/s/comp.sys.mac.system.IDX
lrwx------    1 root     root           64 Aug  7 09:50 1004 -> 
/usr/local/news/spool/overview/c/s/m/s/comp.sys.mac.system.DAT

~ > ls -l /proc/21948/fd | grep overview | wc -l
257

~ > ls -l /proc/21948/fd | grep socket | wc -l
743


I'm not quite sure what to make of this.  I tried using `netstat` to 
see if there were, in fact, a ton of connections that INN could be 
trying to manage, but there don't seem to be.  Thus I'm not sure what 
these sockets represent.

Any thoughts?


-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org